Assessing Journal Credibility

The credibility of a journal may be assessed by examining several key factors:

• Where is it indexed?
  • Is the journal included or indexed in the major bibliographic databases for the field?
  • Are its articles discoverable where the journal claims?
• What is its publishing history?
  • How long has the journal been available?
  • For new journals, is the journal mission clearly available?  Who are the members of the editorial board?
• Is it peer-reviewed?
  • How long does the peer review process take?  Is this a reasonable time frame for a quality assessment?
• What is its impact factor?
  • The Impact Factor is a measurement of average citations received over a two year period. 
  • Does the journal have an impact factor?  If not, are other bibliometric measurements available to determine if scholars are reading and citing articles from this journal?